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Release notes for siduction LXQt Dev Release

We are very happy to present to you today, straight from LinuxTag conference in Berlin, the first integration of the shiny new desktop environment LXQt into a distribution image. This is clearly labeled as a Dev-Release, so do not trust it, it might kill your kittens, although the developers of LXQt flagged it as being beta status. The image is to be found on this and other mirrors.

The released image, that is only available for 64-bit for now is a snapshot of Debian unstable, that also goes by the name of Sid, from 2014-05-08. They are enhanced with the lightweight LXQt desktop environment, some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 3.14-3, accompanied by X-Server 1.15.1.

LXQt, the new kid in town

LXQt, the kingpin of this release is a shiny new desktop environment, that , remarkebly enough, came to live through a merge, not a fork. The desktop envirmonments LXDE (GTK+ 2) and Razor-Qt (Qt 4) bundled their ressources and, on May 7, after more than a year of development, released a first beta version LXQt 0.7, based on top of the Qt 4 framework. The developers say, the port to Qt needs just a bit more RAM than LXDE did, but performance is said to be as blazingly fast as we know LXDE is.

As with our latest full release from January 2014 we again make use of Systemd as init system in version, which Debian will also ship, starting with the release of Debian 8 “Jessie”, expected in early 2015. It is clearly the most technicaly advanced of the init systems at hand.

New commands

Here is a little cheat sheet with some of the commands that are new for booting, handling services and logging with systemd:

Handling Services

systemctl list-units – List all units (where unit is the term for a job/service)

systemctl start [NAME…] – Start (activate) one or more units

systemctl stop [NAME…] – Stop (deactivate) one or more units

systemctl disable [NAME…] – Disable one or more unit files

Check man systemctl for more information. For your comfort we also ship systemd-ui, which is called with the command systemadm.

Changing Runlevels, Reboot and Shutdown

Changing runlevels is also different from sysvinit. What was known as runlevel 3 is now multi-user.target, init 5 changes to graphical.target:

systemctl isolate graphical.target – Will take you to what you know as init 5

systemctl isolate multi-user.target – Will take you to what you know as init 3

systemctl reboot – Shut down and reboot the system

systemctl poweroff – Shut down and reboot the system

Logging with Systemd Journal

Journal is a great win over the agedsyslog. Logging starts earlier, which for sure was one of the backsides ofsyslog. Also there is commands that give you tailored information at your fingertips.

journalctl –all – gives you the full journal of the system and all users

journalctl -f – gives you a live view of the journal as it grows (used to be tail -f /var/log/messages)

journalctl -b – shows the log of the last boot

journalctl -b -p err – shows the log of last boot, limited to the priority ERROR

journalctl –since=yesterday – since Linux people normaly do not reboot much, this is limiting it more than -b

Since we still ship a compatibility package called systemd-sysv, you can also continue to use the commands you are used to for now, other than the ones for the journal. Besides that we set up systemd in a way, where you can use all the above commands for the journal as plain user, no root needed.

Our Resources

Support can be obtained on our forum as well as on IRC. The relevant channels on OFTC-Network are #siduction for english support or #siduction-core, if you like to join in and participate. On your desktop you also find an icon that takes you to the right channel for support, depending on the chosen language.

To be able to act as a testbed for Debian, we are introducing our own bug-tracker. Let me explain how you can help us and Debian by submitting bugreports for broken packages. Weathered users will know how to file bugs directly with the Debian BTS (Bug Tracking System). For users not so comfortable with the system we have reportbug-ng preinstalled.

If you think, you found a bug in a Debian package, please start reportbug-ng and put the name of the package in the adressline on top. The app will now search through the already filed bugs for that package and show those. Now it’s up to you to determine, if “your” bug has already been reported. If it is, ask yourself if you have anything relevant to add to this report or maybe even a patch. If not, you are done for this time. If the bug has not been reported yet and you are not familiar with the BTS yet, you may report the bug in our Bug-Tracker.

That obviously goes for siduction packages as well. We will sort the bugs for you and file them in the appropriate place, if it’s reproducible. Please look out for a forum post with more detailed info on the bug-tracker soon.

Speaking of release and our planned release cycle. There is nothing we can tell you other than that we strive for 2-4 releases per year.

As we are always looking for contributors, here is what to do: Come to IRC to channel #siduction-core and talk to us about what you would like to do within the project, or where you think you could help. As you will notice if you scroll down, we have no art-team at the moment. If you are willing and capable, talk to us.

Hardware Tips

If you should own a ATI Radeon graphics accelerator, please use the failsafe option, when booting the Live-ISO. This option will add the cheatcodes radeon.modeset=0 xmodule=vesa to the Kernel bootline, so that you can boot to X. Before installing, on the Live-ISO, please install firmware-linux-nonfree. To do so, please open your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list with your favourite editor as root and append contrib non-free to the end of the first line. Save the edit and do:

apt-get update && apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

If you install the operating system now, the package will be installed also, preventing you from a garbled screen when first rebooting. Mind that if you rebootbefore installing the system, the changes you made will be lost.

If your system has wireless network, this will probably not work out of the box with free drivers, so you better start with wired network connected. You might want to use the script fw-detect to get information on wireless drivers. The installer will prompt you for any missing firmware and guide you through the process of installing it.

Last but not least a hint for users of the kernel based virtual machine KVM. The developement of a frontend for the kernelbased virtual machine (kvm) has begun as a fork of qemu with the name qemu-kvm or short “kvm”. Since qemu version 1.4 all patches of the kvm fork have been integrated back into the qemu source. Also there has been much progress in the field of virtualization. So there is a lot of outdated documentation around. We have a current worksheet for Qemu in our wiki.